* Delay search by a split second on keypress and cancel if another character is typed. Currently if you type a word quickly every keypress results in a separate search that flickers up on the screen, and if there is a delay in results you have to sit and wait for them to appear sequentially.
* Show more information about book in detail view
* Allow building of custom bookshelves (at least without login) by dragging book somewhere, then allow useful actions on that list like emailing info, send to amazon wishlist, compare in amazon somehow, etc.
Please check out my lastest pet project ShelfLuv - an implementation of Amazon instant book search I made for the midVentures hackathon. It won Best Overall App.
I'd love to hear what this community thinks of it and how I can make it better.
I like it. It would be nice if the buy button was more prominent. I found a book I was interested in buying, or at least finding more about. I tried clicking on the book cover and nothing happened. I did notice the Buy button in the top right at the end, but it's not prominent as it's the same colour as the shelf.
A/B test with red - I'll bet you a drink red outperforms green. (Oh, and make sure your conversion isn't clicks, but purchases. I believe the Associates API will let you track by click. And, no Pek, we don't do that tracking at Dawdle. :( )
I was honestly expecting another quick and dirty instant implementation but this is actually very nicely designed. Wish the book covers would slightly faster though.
It was quick and dirty and I wished it did more but that's all I could get done for the hackathon. I have plans to add a few more features and making it a bit more social.
You took the instant, barebones style and turned it on it's head with a beautiful design. Could be slightly smoother, but loading images sucks (especially from Amazon).
Also, works perfectly in my iPad. Great job!
Couple questions...
* You did this in 2 days?
* What tech did you use to build it?
jquery php. I've had this idea for a while - ever since Youtube instant came out. And before that I've just had the idea of a nice book search app that wasn't necessarily 'instant'. So I hit the ground running so to speak.
One suggestion I have is that since search is the main feature of your site, you may want the search box to stand out. Maybe it should be little bigger and in center of the page
I think compelling user interfaces will be how a lot of new startups differentiate themselves. I came to this realization after seeing hipmunk. From a tech standpoint, there wasn't anything new. Just api calls. But the way the info was displayed was novel and intuitive. Same can be said for this app.
Now I'm trying to teach myself how to "do UI". All that said, so...how do you make the book titles smoothly re-arrange? Not sure how to do this.
QuickSand jquery plugin. I used to be a Flex guy and Flex has been doing this for years now. I've only recently seen it on javascript through QuickSand.
Really, really nice. I can see myself using this, as a peeve of mine searching Amazon for books was certainly the horrible UX. First big suggestion: please, please, include some way to scroll for more search results. Also, like another commenter I noticed some odd search behavior for the results to settle down. Last, the name is fantastic. Simple, short, easy to remember. Good job!
Nice work Pek, design looks great! I noticed some odd behavior of the search term suggestions as well, but overall it's awesome. Only suggestion would be having a brief summary of the books on your site, without having to click through to Amazon.
This is awesome! I shared it on Facebook, but your mugshot showed up in the preview rather than say a ShelfLuv logo. The latter would probably be more enticing for my friends to check out!
Hi - looks awesome. Looked through your profile to contact you to ask some questions and found this link - "http://hnofficehours.com/profile/wushupork/ This doesn't seem to work. Is there another way to contact you?
this immediately made me think, don't the amazon API limits prevent one from making more than a few thousand calls an hour. Would be very interested to learn how you are countering that. I simply avoid doing anything with Amazon's product api just because of that reason.
Shelfari is AWESOME! I have a shelf there myself. One annoying UI bug if you can call it that is the perspective of the books don't match the perspective of the shelf. The shelf is a head on shot and the books look like you see them from a slight angle from the left. Minor stuff that probably nobody notices. But if you look at the bottom right corner of the shelf and see a book, you'll know what I mean.
* Delay search by a split second on keypress and cancel if another character is typed. Currently if you type a word quickly every keypress results in a separate search that flickers up on the screen, and if there is a delay in results you have to sit and wait for them to appear sequentially.
* Show more information about book in detail view
* Allow building of custom bookshelves (at least without login) by dragging book somewhere, then allow useful actions on that list like emailing info, send to amazon wishlist, compare in amazon somehow, etc.